Cher, Cyndi Lauper at the Pepsi Center, 5-28-14 (photos, review)

At 68, Cher isn’t fooling anybody, not even herself. She’s still out there, still filling the biggest arena in town, for god’s sake, and everybody knows why.

Because she’s willing to be Cher: Not particularly skilled at anything but somehow winning at everything. Showy, bawdy, sexy, sweaty, sequined and dripping of cheese. So much cheese. All she does is “come out in ridiculous costumes and sing and be fabulous,” as she sums it up herself at the top of the night.

But, of course, she is fabulous, from start to finish, and she is ridiculous, and the crowd can’t help but go wild for the cheese.

For the warrior queen number: Cher sings her hit “Strong Enough” in a feathered headdress in front of dancing girls in little more than floor-length loin cloths and dancing boys in little more than sequined arm bands.

For the vampire number: Cher sings her hit “Dressed to Kill” in a black crow headdress in front of dancing boys wearing tiny horns and dancing girls in sequined shoulder wings.

Or the ’60s number: Cher sings her hit “The Beat Goes On,” this time in the sequins herself that take the form of a red mini-dress, with the boys in low-rise, bell bottoms pump, pump pumping their crotches and the girls shaking their butts in go-go boots.

Cheesy? Oh yeah, like something Kraft makes. And so much fun, too. It all melts into the sticky kind of queso you get at Taco Bell when when a screen lowers on stage and Cher sings her hit “I Got You Babe,” dueting with Sonny Bono, her ex-husband and ex-show biz partnered who died 15 years ago.

And this is just the first half-hour of her 97-minute romp at Pepsi Center Wednesday night. Next comes the circus number setting up “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” and the tribal number, setting up “Half-Breed” and the nightclub number setting up “Welcome to Burlesque.”

It would take a Trojan horse to top that. No problem, Cher pops out of one soon after, dressed like Apollo to sing “Take it Like a Man.” Then she slips into her most famous outfit of all — that signature bikini on steroids from her 25-year-old comeback video — to sing “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Yes, she pulls that costume off in 2014. Her ass rocks harder than her band.

A half-century in, Cher still has her act together, though she doesn’t take herself too seriously. This is her third farewell tour, after all, and she promises it will be her last and everyone in the room hopes she lying, again.

It’s charming, no doubt, and the secret to Cher’s long-running success. After so many magazine interviews about her personal life, so many hits and flops and hits, so many wigs, she’s the ultimate in-joke.

She’s like family to all of America, a cousin you can’t get rid of, and have no choice but to love. Her next concert, on Friday, is in Lincoln, Nebraska, where ever that is, and good tickets are going for $160 each. On Saturday, she plays Kansas City.

At 68, she’s not fooling anyone, and everyone, near, far and nowhere, can respect that.

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Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Arts and Entertainment writer and critic at The Denver Post and a regular contributor to Reverb.

John Leyba is a Denver Post photojournalist and regular contributor to Reverb.